Why Are Toxic Relationships Addictive, and How Can You Heal?

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Written by the Clinical Team at Oregon Trail Recovery, a trusted provider of drug and alcohol rehab in Portland, Oregon. Our experienced staff specializes in evidence-based addiction treatment, long-term recovery support, and compassionate care for individuals and families across the Pacific Northwest.

Key Takeaways

  • The compulsive pull toward a harmful partner is not a character flaw but a learned loop involving intermittent reinforcement, attachment anxiety, trauma physiology, and isolation that can be unlearned with support.
  • Toxic and abusive are not the same — abuse involves fear, coercion, or control by one person, and recognizing that distinction shapes whether safety planning or couples work is appropriate.
  • Substance use and relationship trauma often reinforce each other, which is why trauma-informed care addresses both together rather than asking a person to sort out which came first.7
  • Healing follows a sequence — safety, psychoeducation, skills, then harder material — and works best through individualized planning and survivor-led pacing, not willpower or generic checklists.7, 3

The Pull You Cannot Explain to Anyone

You already know something is wrong. That is not the hard part. The hard part is the moment you catch yourself checking their name on your phone again, or rehearsing a different version of the last fight in your head, or driving the long way home because the short way goes past their street. You can see the pattern. You still cannot seem to stop.

If you have ever thought, Why does leaving feel like something is being pulled out of me? — you are not broken, and you are not weak. Something real is happening in your nervous system, your attachment history, and sometimes in the way you have learned to cope with pain. Researchers are still debating the right language for it, but the pull you feel has mechanisms behind it, not character flaws.

This article walks through those mechanisms plainly, separates toxic patterns from abuse, and shows what trauma-informed healing actually looks like — especially if you are reading this somewhere in Oregon, Washington, or the wider Pacific Northwest and wondering where to start.

Is a Toxic Relationship Actually an Addiction?

Short answer: no, not in the way the DSM defines addiction. There is no diagnosis called "relationship addiction" or "love addiction" in the current clinical manuals. What researchers do find, consistently, is that the compulsive pull you feel toward a partner who hurts you overlaps with something addiction and attachment have in common — a learned loop between relief, distress, and the person you associate with both.

A 2025 systematic review identified 27 studies, with a meta-analysis of 15 studies covering 3,628 participants, that found what researchers call "love addiction" was positively associated with anxious attachment at r = 0.39, and only weakly tied to avoidant attachment at r = −0.09.6 Translation: the people most likely to feel hooked on a harmful relationship tend to be the ones whose nervous systems learned early that connection is uncertain and must be chased. The authors are careful to say the construct still needs clearer definition and should not be treated as a substance-like disorder.6

A 2025 longitudinal study of 80 couples assessed at baseline and three months later added that attachment anxiety correlated strongly with low self-confidence, and that compulsive romantic behavior showed a positive association with emotional dependence.4 The sample is small, so hold the finding loosely — but it points in the same direction.

So when you say it feels like an addiction, you are describing something real. You are just not describing a character defect. You are describing a pattern researchers can measure, and patterns can be unlearned.

Why Does It Feel Like Withdrawal When You Try to Leave?

Intermittent Reinforcement: The Slot-Machine Effect

Here is the uncomfortable part: the relationship is not painful all the time. If it were, leaving would be easier. What hooks you is the unpredictability — the apology after the silent treatment, the tender text after the week of coldness, the one good night after a stretch of bad ones. Your brain learns to wait for the good moment, because it has learned the good moment eventually comes.

Behavioral researchers call this intermittent reinforcement — a reward schedule where the payoff is unpredictable rather than guaranteed. It is the same pattern that makes slot machines compulsive. A guaranteed reward every time is easy to walk away from. A reward that might come, that sometimes does, that you cannot predict — that is the pattern your nervous system chases hardest.

So when you catch yourself thinking but last Tuesday was perfect, you are not making excuses. You are describing a learning pattern working exactly as designed. Naming it does not make it stop pulling at you overnight. It does loosen the grip of self-blame, which is the first thing that has to loosen before anything else can move.

Attachment Anxiety and the Fear of Being Alone

Attachment is the word psychologists use for how you learned, very early, whether the people you needed would show up. If connection felt steady, you likely grew into someone who can tolerate distance without panic. If connection felt uncertain — sometimes warm, sometimes gone, hard to predict — your nervous system may have learned to stay vigilant, to chase, to read a partner's face for signs the ground is shifting. That is attachment anxiety, and it is one of the strongest predictors researchers have found for feeling compulsively drawn to a harmful partner.

A 2025 systematic review that identified 27 studies and included 15 studies with 3,628 participants in its meta-analysis found that "love addiction" was positively associated with anxious attachment at r = 0.39, and only weakly negatively associated with avoidant attachment at r = −0.09.6 In plain terms: the pull you feel is not evidence that something is wrong with you as a person. It is evidence that your attachment system is doing what it learned to do — chase connection, especially when it feels like it might disappear.

This is why the thought of being alone can feel physically unbearable, not just lonely. Your body is reading solitude as danger because, at some earlier point, it was. The work is not to shame yourself out of needing closeness. The work is to build enough steadiness inside you — and around you, through safe people — that your nervous system stops reading alone as abandoned. That takes time, and it takes practice. It does not take willpower.

Infographic showing how attachment anxiety fuels compulsive pull in toxic relationships, with r=0.39 correlation

Trauma Physiology: When Your Nervous System Learns the Pattern

Your body keeps score of things your mind would rather not re-examine. When a relationship involves repeated cycles of threat and relief — a fight, then making up; silence, then sudden warmth; fear, then forgiveness — your nervous system starts to pair the person with the relief itself. The same partner who causes the distress becomes the one your body associates with its release. That is not weakness. That is conditioning.

Over time, this can look like a racing heart when their name appears on your phone, nausea when they go quiet, or a strange calm the moment they finally respond. Your body is not confused. It has learned a loop, and loops do not care whether they are good for you. They just repeat.

This is also why the first days or weeks after leaving can feel like genuine withdrawal — sleeplessness, intrusive thoughts, a hollow ache that will not sit still. You are not relapsing emotionally. You are detoxing from a pattern your body was trained to crave. Trauma-informed care treats this as expected and treatable, not as proof that you should go back.7 It does mean that healing works best when you have support, not just resolve.

Isolation Narrows Your World Until Only They Fit In It

Harmful relationships rarely announce themselves by cutting you off from people. They do it slowly. A friend becomes "too much drama." A sister "never liked them anyway." Your coworker lunches get cancelled because something is wrong at home. The world gets quieter and smaller, and you may not notice until the only person left to lean on is the one causing most of the weight.

Isolation is a mechanism, not a side effect. The smaller your world gets, the larger your partner's role in it becomes — emotionally, logistically, financially. Of course leaving feels impossible. There is nowhere to land because the landing places have been quietly removed.

If you are reading this and realizing how few people you have talked to lately, that recognition itself is movement. You do not have to tell anyone everything to begin reversing it. A single text to someone who used to know you — thinking of you, miss you — is a thread back into a wider world. You will need that world when the time comes.

Where Does 'Toxic' End and 'Abusive' Begin?

This distinction matters more than almost anything else in this article, so it gets its own section. "Toxic" is a broad word people use for relationships that are chronically painful, draining, or stuck in bad patterns — two people who bring out the worst in each other, poor communication, repeated breakups, resentment that will not clear. Abuse is narrower and more specific. Abuse is a pattern in which one person uses fear, control, coercion, humiliation, isolation, threats, or physical or sexual harm to maintain power over the other. One person is not safe. That is the line.

Emotional abuse is not a lesser form of harm — it is clinically significant on its own. The CDC's 2023/2024 Intimate Partner Violence Data Brief found that about 30.2% of U.S. women — roughly 38.6 million people — have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner, which includes things like coercive control, humiliation, name-calling, and intimidation.2 These numbers reflect self-reported experiences in a national survey, so they likely undercount what actually happens, but they are enough to say plainly: if the pattern in your relationship includes any of this, you are not overreacting by naming it.

Infographic showing 30.2% of U.S. women experience psychological aggression from a partner.

How Substance Use Deepens the Cycle

Here is something a lot of articles on this topic leave out: alcohol and drugs often sit right in the middle of a harmful relationship, and pretending they do not makes healing harder. Substances can start as the thing that gets you through another bad night — a few drinks to blunt the edge of a fight, something stronger to sleep after they stormed out. That is not weakness. That is a person trying to survive a situation that is wearing their nervous system down.

The trouble is that the same substances that take the edge off also lower the clarity you need to see the pattern, the energy you need to leave, and the follow-through you need to stay gone. Judgment softens. Promises you made to yourself after the last incident get easier to break. The partner's apology lands harder when you are already dysregulated. The slot-machine loop and the substance loop start reinforcing each other, and each one hides the other from view.

Sometimes it runs the other direction. A partner's drinking or drug use fuels the cycles of threat and remorse, and your own use grows as a way to stay in the relationship without feeling it. Either way, you are now carrying two patterns at once — and treating only one tends to leave the other intact.

This is why trauma-informed care treats substance use and relationship trauma together rather than in sequence.7 You do not have to sort out which came first. You just need support that will not ask you to.

The Health Cost of Staying Stuck

Living inside a relationship that keeps hurting you is not just emotionally expensive. It is physically expensive, in ways researchers can measure. When your nervous system spends months or years braced for the next fight, the next silence, the next unpredictable mood, the wear shows up in your sleep, your immune system, your blood pressure, your appetite, and eventually your mental health.

The CDC's Intimate Partner Violence Prevention Resource reports that 52% of women and 17% of men who experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by a partner reported PTSD symptoms related to that violence.8 That is not a prediction about you — it is a measurement across many people — but it is enough to say the body-level cost is real and common. Chronic stress, depression, anxiety, and substance use often travel alongside it.

Naming this is not meant to scare you into leaving tonight. It is meant to give you permission to treat your own exhaustion as information. You are not making it up. You are not being dramatic. The cost is real, and so is the case for care that treats it that way.

What Trauma-Informed Healing Actually Looks Like

A Framework for Recovery That Does Not Rely on Willpower

If willpower were enough, you would have left already. You are smart. You have tried. The reason willpower keeps failing is that the pattern you are up against lives in your nervous system, not in your decision-making. Trauma-informed care is designed around that fact.

SAMHSA's foundational guidance for behavioral-health programs, TIP 57, lays out treatment objectives that work in roughly this order:

  1. establish safety first,
  2. provide psychoeducation about what trauma does to the body and mind,
  3. offer trauma-informed peer support,
  4. normalize common trauma reactions so you stop reading them as personal failure,
  5. help you identify and manage triggers, and
  6. integrate trauma care with substance-use treatment when both are present.7

That sequence matters. Trying to process the hardest memories before you are safe can destabilize you, which is why good programs do not start there.7

In practice, this looks less dramatic than people expect. It looks like a counselor explaining why your chest tightens when their name comes up, and why that is not a sign to go back. It looks like learning that intrusive thoughts after leaving are expected, not evidence of love. It looks like getting steady sleep, steady meals, and steady people around you before you ever open the harder material. Trauma-informed modalities offered at Oregon Trail Recovery — including cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and Seeking Safety — are generally used in this skills-first spirit, building stability before harder material.

You are not supposed to white-knuckle your way through this. You are supposed to have support that assumes your reactions make sense.

Safety Planning Is Personal, Not a Checklist

You may have seen the generic safety-planning lists online — pack a bag, hide a key, memorize an address. Those lists are not wrong, but they can feel insulting when your actual situation includes shared children, a lease in both names, a partner who controls the bank account, a disability that limits your mobility, or an immigration status that complicates everything. The U.S. Department of Justice's national protocol for intimate partner violence response says this plainly: safety planning is individualized and collaborative because leaving or finding alternate housing is not plausible for every person.3

A real safety plan starts with your specific life. What does an average Tuesday look like? Who already knows some of what is happening? Where is your phone usually charged? What do your mornings depend on — a car, a bus line, a childcare pickup, a job you cannot miss? What does your partner tend to do when you push back, and what do they tend to do when you pull away quietly? A trained advocate can walk through those questions with you without pressuring you to make any decision today.

In Oregon, Call to Safety at 888-235-5333 can help you build that plan with someone who does this work every day — whether you are planning to leave this month, this year, or not yet at all.1 Staying while you plan is also a plan.

Survivor-Led Models and What They Teach the Rest of Us

One of the clearest shifts in trauma care over the past decade has been toward models where the person who lived the experience leads the pace. The VA's RISE program — Recovering from Intimate Partner Violence through Strengths and Empowerment — is a useful example. It is a brief, trauma-informed intervention, typically up to around eight sessions, and the person receiving care chooses which sessions to focus on in collaboration with the therapist: safety planning, health effects, coping, self-care, social support, difficult decisions, resources, or moving forward.5 No one hands you a worksheet and tells you what to feel.

You do not have to be a Veteran, or in a RISE program, to take the principle with you. The lesson is that healing works better when you are the one deciding what to touch and when. A good counselor will offer options and explain tradeoffs. They will not pressure you to leave on their timeline, label you for staying, or treat your relationship like a crisis to be managed around you. If the care you find does not feel that way, you are allowed to look for care that does.

First Steps if You Are Reading This Late at Night in the Pacific Northwest

You do not have to decide everything tonight. You just have to decide the next small thing. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. If you are not in immediate danger but you know something has to change, Call to Safety at 888-235-5333 is an Oregon-based line that can help you think through your specific situation with someone trained in this work — whether you are planning to leave soon, planning to stay for now, or still sorting out what you want.1 They will not pressure you.

If the thought of hurting yourself has come up, please call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. That call is free, confidential, and available right now.

Then try one more small thing before you close your laptop. Text someone who used to know you. Drink a glass of water. Write down one sentence about how your body feels. These sound too simple to matter. They are how a nervous system that has been bracing for a long time starts to learn that this moment, right here, is safe enough.

Healing From Toxic Relationships and Co-Occurring Substance Use at Oregon Trail Recovery

If a harmful relationship and substance use have grown tangled together in your life, you deserve care that treats both at once instead of asking you to pick which one to work on first. Oregon Trail Recovery is a Portland-based drug rehab serving adults across Oregon, Washington, and the wider Pacific Northwest, with gender-specific residential programs and a long-term intensive outpatient program built around trauma-informed modalities like CBT, DBT, and Seeking Safety. Our team — CADCs and an LPC — works with people whose stories include relationship trauma, not around it. Treatment length is based on clinical need, not an insurance clock. When you are ready to talk through what support could look like, reach out to Oregon Trail Recovery and we will meet you where you are.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is 'relationship addiction' a real diagnosis?

No. The current clinical manuals do not include "relationship addiction" or "love addiction" as formal diagnoses. Researchers studying the pattern tie it more closely to anxious attachment and emotional dependence than to a substance-like disorder, and they say the construct still needs clearer definition.6

Why do I keep going back even when I know the relationship hurts me?

Going back is not failure. It is often what the pattern is built to produce. Unpredictable warmth after cold stretches trains your nervous system to wait for the good moment, and attachment anxiety makes being alone feel like danger rather than quiet. Naming the mechanism is where the loosening starts.

How do I know if my relationship has moved from toxic to abusive?

Ask yourself whether fear is part of why you stay — fear of their reaction, retaliation, withdrawal of money, housing, or access to your children. Abuse is a pattern of control, coercion, humiliation, isolation, or threats, not just chronic conflict. If any of that fits, Call to Safety at 888-235-5333 can help you think it through.1

Can substance use make it harder to leave a harmful relationship?

Yes. Alcohol and drugs can start as a way to survive bad nights and then soften the clarity, energy, and follow-through you need to stay gone. Trauma-informed care treats substance use and relationship trauma together rather than asking you to sort out which one came first.7

What should I do tonight if I am not ready to leave but I am not okay?

You do not have to decide everything tonight. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. If thoughts of hurting yourself have come up, call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Otherwise, text one person who used to know you, drink a glass of water, and give your body a few minutes of quiet.

How can family members support a loved one stuck in this pattern?

Stay in the picture, even when they go quiet or go back. Ask what feels safe rather than issuing ultimatums, since isolation is part of what traps people. Safety planning is individualized, not a checklist, so follow their pace while keeping the door open.3 Your steadiness is a landing place.

References

  1. Oregon Department of Human Services: Domestic Violence Services. https://www.oregon.gov/odhs/dv/Pages/default.aspx
  2. 2023/2024 Intimate Partner Violence Data Brief. https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/media/pdfs/intimatepartnerviolence-brief.pdf
  3. A National Protocol for Intimate Partner Violence Medical Forensic Examinations. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-05/National_Protocol_for_IPV_MFE_May_2023.pdf
  4. A longitudinal network analysis of the relationship between love addiction, insecure attachment patterns, and interpersonal dependence. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11966886/
  5. Recovering from IPV through Strengths and Empowerment (RISE). https://www.va.gov/files/2024-04/RISE%20Flyer%20for%20Veterans.pdf
  6. Conceptualizing love addiction within the attachment perspective: A systematic review and meta-analysis. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12284683/
  7. Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services. https://library.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/sma15-4420.pdf
  8. Intimate Partner Violence Prevention Resource for Action. https://www.cdc.gov/violence-prevention/media/pdf/resources-for-action/IPV-Prevention-Resource_508.pdf

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